Internet Fire Challenge Leaves 12 Year Old Girl Horribly Burned and on a Ventilator

I wish for your kids, if you have/are having any, to never do fucking stupid things, ever. Then, once they're 18, you can claim to be a first class parent. Congratulations, you are truly one of the few. Kudos.
For the mere mortals among us, our kids do stupid things. When I was young, I did stupid things that if gone wrong, could have put a good hurtin' on me or killed me.

In this case setting oneself on fire is a stupid thing from any angle. But not from a kid's angle when they see some fake shit on youtube and maybe have something to prove in front of their friends.

Oh, I know I know, you teach children about fire and danger and stupid and don't follow others and youtube is stupid. But guess what, they'll still do stupid things. It's not always the parents fault.
And unless you do extreme helicoptering, which IMO on the whole is more hurtful to children, well you're not gonna catch all of those things.

Instead of berating the parent, I'm glad she openly spoke about it even though most likely she must've felt humiliated and judged by people like you already. Good on her, she might prevent a few of those instances.

No.

Her 12 year old child... doused herself in alcohol and lit herself on fire.

This is not stupidity/chance, like playing with a gun or playing with matches and setting house on fire.

She intentionally doused herself in alcohol and lit herself on fire...

This is definitely something the parent could have done something about or been aware of. There was definitely something else wrong that allowed this to happen. This was no sad accident.



Twelve year olds do not douse themselves in alcohol and light themselves on fire.


(Your point is definitely valid for normal stupid shit that can happen).
 
Take any suicidal act and add the word "challenge" to the end of it and people will be stupid enough to try it.
 
I wish for your kids, if you have/are having any, to never do fucking stupid things, ever. Then, once they're 18, you can claim to be a first class parent. Congratulations, you are truly one of the few. Kudos.
For the mere mortals among us, our kids do stupid things. When I was young, I did stupid things that if gone wrong, could have put a good hurtin' on me or killed me.

In this case setting oneself on fire is a stupid thing from any angle. But not from a kid's angle when they see some fake shit on youtube and maybe have something to prove in front of their friends.

Oh, I know I know, you teach children about fire and danger and stupid and don't follow others and youtube is stupid. But guess what, they'll still do stupid things. It's not always the parents fault.
And unless you do extreme helicoptering, which IMO on the whole is more hurtful to children, well you're not gonna catch all of those things.

Instead of berating the parent, I'm glad she openly spoke about it even though most likely she must've felt humiliated and judged by people like you already. Good on her, she might prevent a few of those instances.
I don't know about you, but I expect kids (well everyone, but not my problem) to do stupid shit. If there were three twelve-year-olds in my care, I don't know I would "made them pancakes and went to take a nap."

Not that I'm blaming the mom, dousing yourself with something flammable and lighting it is pretty damned stupid twelve or not

Edit: How you should be doing internet challenges
 
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If they played monkey island like me when I was 8, this wouldn't be an issue today...
comi-hot-beach.jpg

Img source
 
Have to wonder if the kid had really experienced fire before. With today's "Everything has to be perfectly safe for kids." mentality, a lot of kids have little idea what danger is. By the time I was twelve, I had done a face plant off a bicycle without a helmet, built my own fire several times with the resulting burnt fingers, been stung by about 10 wasps from banging a trash can lid complete with nest, used fireworks, etc. I was well aware that things can hurt. Still did stupid things, some that would qualify as a Homeland Security event today, but managed to avoid major injury because I knew that stuff could be dangerous and took some basic precautions.
 
You and kirbyrj should have kids together then, they'll be perfect.

I have kids... oldest is 7. Even the 3 year old knows not to touch fire.. or the stove.. or the oven.. or other stupid crap that should be known when very young.

I was not a "safe" 12 year old by any means.... ramped by bike off of the edge of a dry river bed.. probably at least a 10-12 foot drop. Bury the front tire in the sand and let myself fly off. Sure I guess I could have gotten hurt, but there was nothing but sand sand.. and I checked the area out first.

Lost of other "dumb" stuff I did, but even thinking about lighting myself on fire.. umm.. NOOOO.

That takes a special kind of stupid.
 
Hate to say it but as a kid I would stop and think about how dumb some of this crap was.... I may have been called chicken, but I'm quite alive.
 
FFS...
these arent "challenges" they are trolling that idiots are falling for.


no they moved it behind counter do to people drinking it or blowing/lighting themselves up.

that is how I always feel for these. Along the way these things went from challenges to being mentally retarded and recording it.

I wish for your kids, if you have/are having any, to never do fucking stupid things, ever. Then, once they're 18, you can claim to be a first class parent. Congratulations, you are truly one of the few. Kudos.
For the mere mortals among us, our kids do stupid things. When I was young, I did stupid things that if gone wrong, could have put a good hurtin' on me or killed me.

In this case setting oneself on fire is a stupid thing from any angle. But not from a kid's angle when they see some fake shit on youtube and maybe have something to prove in front of their friends.

Oh, I know I know, you teach children about fire and danger and stupid and don't follow others and youtube is stupid. But guess what, they'll still do stupid things. It's not always the parents fault.
And unless you do extreme helicoptering, which IMO on the whole is more hurtful to children, well you're not gonna catch all of those things.

Instead of berating the parent, I'm glad she openly spoke about it even though most likely she must've felt humiliated and judged by people like you already. Good on her, she might prevent a few of those instances.

No, to a degree it is the parents fault. Yes you can't watch your child all the time but you should still should have gotten into their heads at least some basic fundamentals. if your 12 year old shots themself in the head as part of a challenge, if they take a full bottle of pain pills as a challenge, if they stab themselves in the head as part of a challenge, if they tie a 50 lb rock to their feet and toss it into a lake as a challenge or they set themselves on fire to burn to death as a challenge then you have not taught them the basics of life and death. committing suicide is not a challenge...it is just challenging for some to do.

riding a skate board off the roof can break some bones, and that is doing something stupid where you can say a kid is being a kid and being stupid. But let's take that kid and have them ride a skate board off the roof of a 100 story building, can you really use the same logic?

By the time they are a teens (or close to being one) your child should understand certain things. If you missed up in that part of teaching them stuff then you missed up.
 
I set my arm on fire trying to light 151 shots for some friends. Appently I had spilled 151 all over my arm and not realized it (because I was wasted.) When it went to light the shots, my whole arm went up up in flames instead. It went out pretty quick however it burned off all the hair.

I was almost 30 at the time, whoops.
 
I set my arm on fire trying to light 151 shots for some friends. Appently I had spilled 151 all over my arm and not realized it (because I was wasted.) When it went to light the shots, my whole arm went up up in flames instead. It went out pretty quick however it burned off all the hair.

I was almost 30 at the time, whoops.
yeah that's a drunken accident. not the retardedness of these "challenges".
 
I wish for your kids, if you have/are having any, to never do fucking stupid things, ever. Then, once they're 18, you can claim to be a first class parent. Congratulations, you are truly one of the few. Kudos.

Guess I'm one of the few, since my kid never did anything even close to this stupid. Neither did any of my brothers kids, so they must have done something right too.

My kid just shakes her head when she sees something like this. She knows it's stupid/dangerous and would never try something like that.

She does laugh at all the stupid, non-dangerous stuff people do and wonders why anyone would be that stupid.


Maybe it's because she wasn't allowed on social media when she was that young, even though she's been using a computer since just after her 1st birthday.
 
I don't get it the internet and smartphones were suppose to make us smarter. I had a neighbor suck old fuel from his boat with a shop vac, what is going on with people? They are literally shitting their brains.
 
Whats the world coming to? I remember back when I was a kid, challenges were, get that girls number, do this bike or skateboard trick, don't get hit by a car crossing the freeway on foot....ect. Now there's people setting themselves on fire?!!!

Sign of the times I guess. :confused: That doesn't sound like fun at all.
 
What happened to the good old days before the internet when children had clean, wholesome fun, like BB gun wars, or firecracker wars, or BOTTLE ROCKET WARS!!? (Fuck yeah!)

This is unrelated to the stupidity of lighting yourself on fire (and I am not advocating lighting yourself on fire), but a friend once told me that the difference between adventure and stupidity is your budget. You see, not everyone can afford the years of training and thousands of dollars it takes to die while climbing the Himalayas. Not everyone can afford to drown while scuba diving, not everyone can afford to hit the wall while base jumping with a wing suit. Most people can't afford to hit a deer with a Harley Davidson and they can't afford to go out with their buddies and flip a $10,000 Yamaha ATV into an early grave. But most people can afford the cost of rope for a decent homemade zip line. The difference is, if you die doing the expensive things that's a tragedy. Dying because you fell off your own cheap-ass zip line makes you an idiot.

Using some psychological algebra, doing stupid things can actually be rewarding, because (as shown above) stupid is always the cheapest adventure you can go on. So go ahead and see if you can get a chainsaw to power your old bicycle. And remember, they only mock you because you died on a low budget.

I had a neighbor suck old fuel from his boat with a shop vac, what is going on with people?

Hey now, that should have worked...

About a block from my house there used to be a beautiful 30's era house, a big place built by a wealthy mill owner. And the little old lady who lived there used to make spiced olive oil to give away at Christmas time. She would make her spiced olive oil in a crock pot, but one day the crock pot stopped working, so she lifted the ceramic crock out of the crock pot and put it on the stove, and set the (gas) burner to it's lowest setting, and left to buy a new crock pot, and anyway, that house burned down.
 
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Here is my tip to the world for any idea you get from social media or email:

Steps to follow:

1) Imagine you are on a public bus
2) Random man with no pants enters bus at next stop
3) No pants man sits next to you
4) Pretend whatever you are reading is being said by no pants man
5) If everything still makes sense given this context, then you are good to go
6) If something seems fishy... stop...

and if you find yourself on fire:

upload_2018-8-23_0-31-41.png
 
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Kids do stupid things. Hell, I still did a lot of dumb shit when I was 30 and thought I knew better.
 
Is the 'fire challenge' even a thing? Youtube "fire challenge" and you'll only see news stories about this event in Detroit...
 
I'm sorry if you are 12 years old and don't know what will happen when you light rubbing alcohol on yourself, maybe you deserved it.
Even though I find most of my friends' screaming kids insufferable, I gotta say holy shit are some of the smug comments here needlessly harsh if not cruel.

Seems like people have become so desensitized to kneejerking to headlines that it's like they aren't real anymore, because we're inundated with them.

Because it's a weird kind of schadenfreude to mock kids struck by tragedy - even if self inflicted - and it shouldn't be such a struggle to remember there's a human being trying to find their way in the world that's connected to the other end of their stupidity. /little violin
 
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I'm speechless.
I hope people won't blame YouTube or technology on this.
 
Here is my tip to the world for any idea you get from social media or email:

Steps to follow:

1) Imagine you are on a public bus
2) Random man with no pants enters bus at next stop
3) No pants man sits next to you
4) Pretend whatever you are reading is being said by no pants man
5) If everything still makes sense given this context, then you are good to go
6) If something seems fishy... stop...

and if you find yourself on fire:

View attachment 98261


You got.

Bad thoughts, bad, bad thoughts homie.
 
I gotta say holy shit are some of the smug comments here needlessly harsh if not cruel.

--- NSFW



If you haven't heard of Letterkenny, go surf some YouTube. Sadly, we can't get it down here in the lower North America.
 
...and it shouldn't be such a struggle to remember there's a human being trying to find their way in the world that's connected to the other end of their stupidity. /little violin

The problem with having empathy for the idiotic is that they breed, and soon society is overrun with them. We don't need a surfeit of morons. We don't need so many stupid people that we have to wrap everything and everyone in cotton wool just so they don't set themselves on fire. If someone is that retarded then I'll happily hand them the bottle of rubbing alcohol myself.
 
I wish for your kids, if you have/are having any, to never do fucking stupid things, ever. Then, once they're 18, you can claim to be a first class parent. Congratulations, you are truly one of the few. Kudos.
For the mere mortals among us, our kids do stupid things. When I was young, I did stupid things that if gone wrong, could have put a good hurtin' on me or killed me.

In this case setting oneself on fire is a stupid thing from any angle. But not from a kid's angle when they see some fake shit on youtube and maybe have something to prove in front of their friends.

Oh, I know I know, you teach children about fire and danger and stupid and don't follow others and youtube is stupid. But guess what, they'll still do stupid things. It's not always the parents fault.
And unless you do extreme helicoptering, which IMO on the whole is more hurtful to children, well you're not gonna catch all of those things.

Instead of berating the parent, I'm glad she openly spoke about it even though most likely she must've felt humiliated and judged by people like you already. Good on her, she might prevent a few of those instances.

Can't like this enough. 100% on point here.
 
We rightly excuse children for youthful transgressions born of innocence and naivety, but some things are just unforgivable stupidity, even for a 12 year-old.

Nowadays we're using the "just a kid" excuse for everything, as well as applying it to people in their 20s.
 
Surely setting fire to a substance designed to store mass quantities of energy will not have the result of causing more fire.
 
I wish for your kids, if you have/are having any, to never do fucking stupid things, ever. Then, once they're 18, you can claim to be a first class parent. Congratulations, you are truly one of the few. Kudos.
For the mere mortals among us, our kids do stupid things. When I was young, I did stupid things that if gone wrong, could have put a good hurtin' on me or killed me.

In this case setting oneself on fire is a stupid thing from any angle. But not from a kid's angle when they see some fake shit on youtube and maybe have something to prove in front of their friends.

Oh, I know I know, you teach children about fire and danger and stupid and don't follow others and youtube is stupid. But guess what, they'll still do stupid things. It's not always the parents fault.
And unless you do extreme helicoptering, which IMO on the whole is more hurtful to children, well you're not gonna catch all of those things.

Instead of berating the parent, I'm glad she openly spoke about it even though most likely she must've felt humiliated and judged by people like you already. Good on her, she might prevent a few of those instances.


I feel the same way, thanks for posting this.
 
Even though I find most of my friends' screaming kids insufferable, I gotta say holy shit are some of the smug comments here needlessly harsh if not cruel.

Seems like people have become so desensitized to kneejerking to headlines that it's like they aren't real anymore, because we're inundated with them.

Because it's a weird kind of schadenfreude to mock kids struck by tragedy - even if self inflicted - and it shouldn't be such a struggle to remember there's a human being trying to find their way in the world that's connected to the other end of their stupidity. /little violin

Struck by tragedy? You mean deliberately created their own tragedy. The amount of coddling that goes on these days is insane. We are doomed as a species if all aspects of survival of the fittest and Darwinism are lost.
 
Here is my tip to the world for any idea you get from social media or email:

Steps to follow:

1) Imagine you are on a public bus
2) Random man with no pants enters bus at next stop
3) No pants man sits next to you
4) Pretend whatever you are reading is being said by no pants man
5) If everything still makes sense given this context, then you are good to go
6) If something seems fishy... stop...

and if you find yourself on fire:

View attachment 98261

your statement can be taken in two different ways. For #5 you need to define the statement as in context making sense for a man with no pants could mean that it is what you would expect a man with no pants riding a public bus to be saying, or you could mean makes sense as if he was a normal every day person.

based on your list it is hard to know what we are using as the standard to select against. Crazy guy being crazy, or "crazy guy" being normal and just not caring / forgetting to put on pants.
 
Struck by tragedy? You mean deliberately created their own tragedy. The amount of coddling that goes on these days is insane. We are doomed as a species if all aspects of survival of the fittest and Darwinism are lost.

Here’s a logical exercise for you to consider.

Survival of the fittest allows for all kinds of nastiness. All dictators, all tyranny. All the worst of the worst is supported, as it rises to power. Joseph Mengele?, sure why not, he had power and authority to do what he did. Nazis were the fittest after all at the time, and in power...



Ugh, the absolute worst of humanity.

Take a maxim perspective of that survival of the fittest philosophy outside the limited organization of the dumb animal and you’ll quickly logically realize it doesn’t work in organized and intelligent humanity.



Now compare a philosphy of living peacefully with each other like Christ teaches. The two greatest commandments 1) love the Lord your God with all your heart and 2) treat your neighbor as yourself. (The basis of the Golden Rule) and run that philosophy to the societal maxim. Which world would you rather live in?
 
we need more of these "challenges". as many a possible, and as deadly as possible. and targeted at children. weed the stupid ones out of the gene pool before they are old enough to procreate. then maybe we can turn back the tide that's pushing us ever closer to Idiocracy.

the stupid ones end up dead, their stupid friends who were there watching get educated. it's a win-win!
 
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